KABUL, Afghanistan — A disagreement between NATO forces and President Hamid Karzai over the use of airstrikes in civilian areas in Afghanistan appeared to deepen Tuesday, with the Afghan leader insisting the aerial bombardment of homes was “absolutely banned” under terms of a new accord with the Western military.
The ongoing push and pull over Western military practices speaks to a larger struggle over how much authority the Afghan government will be able to assert over such matters as the war enters a winding-down phase.
NATO said over the weekend it had agreed to refrain from strikes on residential structures as a general rule, but that it reserved the right to carry out such attacks as a last-ditch measure: in self-defense, when other options were not available. Karzai had complained bitterly following a U.S. airstrike last week in Logar province that killed at least 18 civilians, nearly all of them women and children, as Western and Afghan troops were pursuing a Taliban commander.
“As far as we are concerned … an agreement has been reached clearly with NATO that no bombardment of civilian homes for any reason is allowed,” Karzai told reporters at a nationally televised news conference in the capital on Tuesday. “They cannot use any airplane to bomb Afghan homes, even when they are under attack.”
A spokesman for NATO’s International Security Assistance Force, Lt. Col. Jimmie Cummings, repeated the Western military’s pledge to refrain from using air-delivered munitions against civilian dwellings “unless it is a question of self-defense for our troops on the ground.” He added that strikes on civilian dwellings constituted a “very small percentage” of NATO’s air operations.
Also Tuesday, Afghan officials said a widely reported assertion by the governor of a northern province that a pregnant woman and her unborn child had died when an ambulance en route to the hospital hit a roadside bomb on Monday was erroneous. Interior Ministry spokesman Seddiq Seddiqi said the woman had survived and given birth to her child, who also survived.
The ministry had said five members of the same family, including two women and two children, had died in the explosion, and Sar-e-Pul’s governor, Abdul Jabar Haqben, identified the pregnant woman who was being rushed to the hospital as one of the fatalities.
The governor and his spokesman did not return calls Tuesday requesting information as to how the mistaken identity had occurred. But the acting police chief, Sayed Jahangeer Karamat, said the governor had apparently been given incorrect information by subordinates.
